75th Anniversary Issue
As she lay dying, the widow of a Milwaukee newspaper editor made a gift that has now invigorated journalism for 75 years. Agnes Wahl Nieman, a well-educated woman with a fondness for bicycling, willed money to Harvard to “promote and elevate the standards of journalism.” That $1.4 million bequest (worth about $23 million in today’s dollars) funded the Nieman Fellowship program that has brought 1,442 journalists from around the world to Harvard for a year of study. To celebrate the Nieman Foundation for Journalism’s 75th anniversary, Nieman Reports tells the stories of 75 Nieman Fellows, among them pioneers in biography, documentary filmmaking, and investigative journalism.
Washington Post reporter Marder (1919–2013) made his name on the “red beat,” where he was among the first to challenge U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy
The reason I only covered the first trial of [U.S. Senator Joseph] McCarthy was because during the next trial I was going up to Harvard as a Fellow of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, which is a rare prize to get in journalism. I was delighted to have it because it gave me several things. It gave me the substitute of a great fortune of a college education, at the level of a master’s degree. I also had a lot of dealings and learned a lot from the outstanding members of the faculty—who later became major figures in the Kennedy administration—whom I drew on for the rest of my life in journalism, not as cronies, but as a valuable sources of information, from whom I remained independent, never treating them as sources to whom I had any obligation …
I also met Henry Kissinger. Neither he nor I remember anything that either one of us said at the time, though I do remember an exchange we had later, after he became national security adviser. I had spoken to him for a story, and he called me the next day to say that he was “startled” by what I had written. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Did I misquote you?” He said, “No.” We had no private arrangement at that time, or anything. I said, “I quoted you correctly?” He said, “Oh, you quoted me correctly. I told you my view on the situation.” In the next sentence, however, another senior official source in the administration had said exactly the opposite of what [Kissinger] said. He said, “Why did you do that?” And I said, “That’s called journalism now.”
From an interview with Marder conducted by his nephew, Martin Sokoloski, in March 2012
The reason I only covered the first trial of [U.S. Senator Joseph] McCarthy was because during the next trial I was going up to Harvard as a Fellow of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, which is a rare prize to get in journalism. I was delighted to have it because it gave me several things. It gave me the substitute of a great fortune of a college education, at the level of a master’s degree. I also had a lot of dealings and learned a lot from the outstanding members of the faculty—who later became major figures in the Kennedy administration—whom I drew on for the rest of my life in journalism, not as cronies, but as a valuable sources of information, from whom I remained independent, never treating them as sources to whom I had any obligation … I also met Henry Kissinger. Neither he nor I remember anything that either one of us said at the time, though I do remember an exchange we had later, after he became national security adviser. I had spoken to him for a story, and he called me the next day to say that he was “startled” by what I had written. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Did I misquote you?” He said, “No.” We had no private arrangement at that time, or anything. I said, “I quoted you correctly?” He said, “Oh, you quoted me correctly. I told you my view on the situation.” In the next sentence, however, another senior official source in the administration had said exactly the opposite of what [Kissinger] said. He said, “Why did you do that?” And I said, “That’s called journalism now.”
From an interview with Marder conducted by his nephew, Martin Sokoloski, in March 2012
